Slidin’ Thru The Hollers Like They Do Up North
This morning, east Tennessee had nature’s form of a sneak attack. The streets had been chilled with very low temperatures in the past few days. Then this morning the air temperature hovered around 28 to 30 degrees- just right for ice. The kind of ice that forms in the tiny crevices of the pavement so that it doesn’t make a tell-tale reflection. It’s the kind of ice that can quickly make a road slicker than snot on a Popsicle. And driver’s won’t know it until they look out the windshield and see the headlights of the car driving behind them, and oncoming traffic in their rear view mirror.
It doesn’t matter whether you grew up in Sopchoppy, Florida, Smoky Junction, Tennessee, or Bratwurst, Wisconsin, when the interface between the tire and the roadway is interrupted by a layer of ice, you are going to slide. I saw a videotape of a military tank sliding on an icy road in Germany- a perfect illustration that slick is slick no matter what you are driving. And a northerner was probably driving the tank. If they weren’t, there was one somewhere inside the machine saying “We don’t drive our tanks like this up north.”
There are only so many degrees of incline, decline, or banking in a curve that any vehicle can take when the road is iced over like the inside of a 1950 Kelvinator. In ice- 60 MPH to 0 MPH is the premier performance specification. The only thing I have seen that gives you any help is a computerized system that thinks faster than a driver. Even a driver from up-north.
I’ve heard some reporters this afternoon sound almost hopeful this stuff will re-freeze and cause even more problems tonight and in the morning. Maybe they will find work in Frozen Butt, North Dakota.
Weren’t a lot of people caught off guard because it started off just rain and then it got cold quick and froze?
There are a few people I’d like to send to Frozen butt, ND too!
Now, now my southern friend. I too spent 29 years in the frozen north of MN. One thing your critics don’t seem to remember is that in a Scandahoovia, Minnesota skid, there’s more likely to be really wide shoulders, wider ditches, treeless fields, and less traffic Not only that, there are more areas than less areas in which you can see the curvature of the earth — translation, really really flat and less to collide with. That said, my daughter’s best friend was slid into on a flat country road the day after Thanksgiving and lost his life. So death happens there too. The difference I think your northern boobs were trying to communicate is that they have more practice sliding off the road. Don’t let them tell you they haven’t or that they slide better. After 3 swirls ditchward myself, I have a huge respect for TN terrain and don’t want to be out on it like I was with everybody else Tuesday. My 29 snow and ice years don’t give me a pass.
Is your blood pressure back down now? (love you, love TN) ok then.
I was told, shortly after I arrived in East Tennessee, that I would want to get a four wheel drive vehicle because they are what you need on ice.
I, having just come from Minnesota for 3 years, and having learned to drive in Wisconsin, simply laughed in this person’s face.
Two things are good on ice. One is skates, the other is spikes. No vehicle is worth a damn on ice. The best thing to do with icy roads, stay off of them.
I did have a chuckle as I was sitting in my studio watching Good Morning America (they lost the DirecTV trade…the pinheads) and seeing the video from Knoxville.
Northerners who laugh at folks there are only half right. They can’t drive in that crap either. But, they have had more experience in dealing with it, so they just know a little better….to be late.
I like the content, but that your articles have so many spaces should be modified I think, and epically the end.